Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  Arla cocked her head and gave her an unreadable look. “Come to the concert tomorrow, Eri.”

  “I don’t know if I can—” She didn’t know if she wanted to. A long journey into the city, hours crammed into a seat with others, listening to music that didn’t (if she was honest) interest her that much. She’d already heard it, parts of it over and over. “How about tomorrow’s rehearsal?”

  “No. The concert. I can get you in. If you want to know how musicians think, and why . . . then come.”

  “Are the others—?”

  “I don’t know. Grandmother usually comes to my performances, but the others less often. I wish you would, Eri.”

  Ereza sat in the back row of the concert hall, surrounded by people in formal clothes and dress uniforms. Onstage the orchestra waited, in formal black and white, for the soloist and conductor.

  She saw a stir at the edge of the stage. Arla, in her long swirling dress, with the cello. The conductor—she looked quickly at her program for his name. Mikailos Bogdan.

  Applause, which settled quickly as the house lights went down. Now the clear dome showed a dark night sky with a thick wedge of stars, the edge of the Cursai Cluster. The conductor lifted his arms. Ereza watched; the musicians did not stir. His arms came down.

  Noise burst from speakers around the hall. As if conducting music, Bogdan’s arms moved, but the noise had nothing to do with his direction. Grinding, squealing, exploding—all the noises that Ereza finally recognized as belonging to an armored ground unit in battle. Rattle and clank of treads, grinding roar of engines, tiny voices yelling, screaming, the heavy thump of artillery and lighter crackling of small arms. Around her the others stirred, looked at one another in amazement, then horror.

  Onstage, no one moved. The musicians stared ahead, oblivious to the noise; Ereza, having heard the rehearsal, wondered how they could stand it. And why? Why work so for perfection in rehearsal if they never meant to play? Toward the front, someone stood—someone in uniform—and yelled. Ereza could not hear it over the shattering roar that came from the speakers, then—low-level aircraft strafing, she thought. She remembered that sound. Another two or three people stood up; the first to stand began to push his way out of his row. One of the others was hauled back down by those sitting near him.

  The sound changed, this time to the repetitive crump-crump-crump-crump of bombardment. Vague, near-human sounds, too . . . Ereza shivered, knowing before it came clear what that would be. Screams, moans, sobs . . . it went on far too long. She wanted to get up and leave, but she had no strength.

  Silence, when it finally came, was welcome. Ereza could hear, as her ears regained their balance, the ragged breathing of the audience. Silence continued, the conductor still moving his arms as if the orchestra were responding. Finally, he brought the unnerving performance to a close, turned and bowed to them. A few people clapped, uncertainly; no one else joined them and the sound died away.

  “Disgracefully bad taste,” said someone to Ereza’s right. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing.”

  “Getting us ready to be ravished by Fennaris, no doubt. Have you heard her before?”

  “Only on recordings. I’ve been looking forward to this for decades.”

  “She’s worth it. I heard her first in a chamber group two years ago, and—” The conductor beckoned, and Arla stood; the gossipers quieted. Intent curiosity crackled around the hall, silent but alive.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Arla said. She had an untrained voice, but even so it carried to the back of the hall. “You may be wondering what happened to the Goldieri Concerto. We chose to make another statement about music.”

  The conductor bowed to her, and signaled the orchestra. Each musician held an instrument at arm’s length; at the flick of his baton they all dropped to the floor, the light rattling cases of violins, the softer boom of violas, the clatter and thud and tinkle of woodwinds, brasses, percussion. A tiny round drum rolled along the floor until it ran into someone’s leg and fell over with a final loud tap. Louder than that was the indrawn breath of the audience.

  “I’m Arla,” she said, standing alone, facing a crowd whose confusion was slowly turning to hostility. Ereza felt her skin tingling.

  “Most of you know me as Arla Fennaris, but tonight I’m changing my name. I want you to know why.”

  She turned and picked up her cello, which she had left leaning against her chair. No, Ereza thought, don’t do it. Not that one. Please.

  “You think of me as a cellist,” Arla said, and plucked three notes with one hand. “A cellist is a musician, and a musician—I have this from my own sister, a wounded veteran, as many of you know—a musician is to most of you an impractical child. A fool.” She ran her hand down the strings, and the sound echoed in Ereza’s bones. She shivered, and so did the people sitting next to her. “She tells me, my sister, that the reason we’re at war right now—the reason she lost her arm—is that I am a mere musician, and need protection. I can’t protect myself; I send others out to die, to keep me and my music alive.” Another sweeping move across the strings, and a sound that went through Ereza like a jagged blade. All she could think was No, no, don’t . . . no . . . but she recognized the look on Arla’s face, the tone of her voice. Here was someone committed beyond reason to whatever she was doing.

  But Arla had turned, and found her chair again. She was sitting as she would for any performance, the cello nestled in the hollow of her skirt, the bow in her right hand. “It is easy to make noise,” Arla said. With a move Ereza did not understand, she made an ugly noise explode from the cello. “It takes skill to make music.” She played a short phrase as sweet as spring sunshine. “It is easy to destroy—” She held the cello up, as if to throw it, and again Ereza head the indrawn breath as the audience waited. Then she put it down. “It takes skill to make—in this case, millennia of instrument designers, and Barrahesh, here on Cravor’s World, with a passion for the re-creation of classic instruments. I have no right to destroy his work—but it would be easy.” She tapped the cello’s side, and the resonant sound expressed fragility. “As with my cello, with everything. It is easy to kill; it takes skill to nurture life.” Again she played a short phrase, this one a familiar child’s song about planting flower seeds in the desert.

  “My sister,” Arla said, and her eyes found Ereza’s, and locked onto them. “My sister is a soldier, a brave soldier, who was wounded . . . she would say protecting me. Protection I never asked for, and did not need. Her arm the price of this one—” She held up her right arm. “It is difficult to make music when you are using your sister’s arm. An arm taught to make war, not music. An arm that does not respect music.”

  She lowered her arm. “I can make music only with my own arm, because it’s my arm that learned it. And to play with my arm means throwing away my sister’s sacrifice. Denying it. Repudiating it.” No, Ereza thought at her again. Don’t do this. I will understand; I will change. Please. But she knew it was too late, as it had been too late to change things when she woke after surgery and found her own arm gone. “If my sister wants music, she must learn to make it. If you want music, you must learn to make it. We will teach you; we will play with you—but we will not play for you. Good evening.”

  Again the conductor signaled; the musicians picked up their instruments from the floor, stood, and walked out. For a moment, the shuffling of their feet onstage was the only sound as shock held the audience motionless. Ereza felt the same confusion, the same hurt, the same realization that they would get no music. Then the catcalls began, the hissing, the programs balled up angrily and thrown; some hit the stage and a few hit the musicians. But none of them hurried, none of them looked back. Arla and the conductor waited, side by side, as the orchestra cleared the stage. Ereza sat frozen, unable to move even as people pushed past her, clambered over her legs. She wanted to go and talk to Arla; she knew it would do no good. She did not speak Arla’s language. She never had. Now she knew what Arla meant: she
had never respected her sister before. Now she did. Too late, too late cried her mind, struggling to remember something, anything, of the music.

  Rachael Acks’ Charlie enlists in the Allied Earth Special Forces and becomes a weapon as well as a warrior. But like many other veterans of any war, when she leaves military service and returns home, civilian life is not what she expected.

  They Tell Me There Will Be No Pain

  Rachael Acks

  “O, me alone! Make you a sword of me?”

  —The Tragedy of Coriolanus, William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 7

  Colonel Rathbone attends my final debriefing. I’m wearing a paper hospital gown that doesn’t cover my ass; I’ve got a breeze where no breeze has any right to be, from the back of my neck right down where the good Lord split me. But despite that I’m sweating, the backs of my thighs sticking to the paper covering the hospital table. The metal contacts set all around my head feel cold, sending little shocks that make my teeth itch.

  “Sure you don’t want to re-up?” the Colonel asks. He’s got a deep voice. Jolly. Like a murderous Santa Claus, shaved into military trim. “You’ve got a solid record, all kills, no collateral, no fails. We sure could use you.”

  One of those things is a lie and we both know it. I smile at him with my rattling teeth. “Got to go home and take care of things, sir.” Got to get out of here, sir.

  “Hate to lose you, son.” Rathbone calls everyone son, whether you got a cock or tits. He digs his datapad out of his pocket, calls up the SMOP and starts to read like a robot. No, worse than a robot, robots sound almost human these days.

  Don’t you, Phoebe?

  “ . . . as agreed upon in your contract as signed, upon termination of your service you will return all government property issued to you upon entry, including all surgical and neural enhancements. Do you understand and still agree to these terms?”

  I find I’ve pressed one finger against the visual link terminal on my right temple, like it’s the starter on a car. The scent of lemons floods over my tongue. “I understand and agree, sir.”

  He shuts off the datapad and tucks it back away, claps me on the shoulder. “Then that’s that. Good luck on the outside, son.” Then he turns to go, broad back in olive drab, his crew cut salt and pepper above the stiff collar.

  “Sir?”

  “What?” His eyebrows ask me if I’m changing my mind.

  “They said it won’t hurt.”

  He gives me a kind, lying goddamn smile. “You did three tours, son. You’re tough.”

  The door shuts behind him and I fiddle, peeling slowly at my hangnails. I used to do manicures with my big sister. Nail polish isn’t regulation, not that I could keep from picking it off like I peel away my own skin.

  There will be no pain, Phoebe whispers past my ear and into my spine.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  So this is how it goes, son.

  Ten years ago, you’re a snot-nosed chicken-shit fast-food drone in the making. Bronze medal in high school track and field, chorus line parts only in high school drama, grades that aren’t quite bad enough to justify the way Mommy and Daddy keep cutting back your allowance. Your older sister is the star quarterback of the family team. Full ride to Titan Tech, ships out on the first terraforming mission to Juno, calls home twice a week like a dutiful daughter and runs the hydroponics lab while she watches her kid sister paint her fingernails on the video feed. You still use her soap on days when you miss her; it smells like flowers and baby powder.

  You’re special, she tells you. Don’t listen to anyone else. Join up in the corps, come out to Juno, we’ll be partners.

  You know what happens next. As far as Earth’s concerned, there’s only one thing that happened ten years ago. Only one thing that’s happened in the last ten years, because every goddamn one of us ripped our shirts off and wrote it across our hearts in blood.

  The Drop. July nine. Starfall. Lots of names, one result. A shattered habitat, a woman with wild eyes and a gold cross tattooed on her forehead screaming that her army, they got their authority straight from Jesus Christ Hisself for our racial impurity and hubris, and your big sister, blown out into space, just one of ten thousand meat snowflakes floating in the black. Only you imagine her lying like a broken doll on the floor of the hydroponics lab, tight black curls sprinkled with dust and ice crystals and her fingernails Bahama Coral Pink, tapping faintly in a pool of blood. The same shade she wore the day she took out a pair of tweezers and came at your eyebrows, saying, “Don’t be a wuss, this doesn’t hurt.”

  And just like everyone else on the goddamn planet, you cheer until your head just thumps with it when we make our war of vengeance.

  Contract signing, swearing in, intake, ceremonies, first uniform, boot camp, none of that shit matters. It’s all standard. The point is to make you into a unit, one little cog in the big machine of the Allied (ha!) Earth Special Forces.

  This is the point where it matters. Where it starts to matter. Where it stops mattering.

  Head wrapped in bandages, skull aching from newly drilled holes, random flavors running across your tongue (cantaloupe, cayenne, crawdad bake, we’re in the Cs now) as the nanowires finish bonding to your neurons, you’ve got to focus, soldier, focus, this is important.

  You look at the blank standard-issue datapad screen, shoulders twitching every time a new ghost runs across your vision. A line of green text scrolls up, like you’ve jumped back to the goddamn twentieth century, but instead of Want to play a game or some shit like that, it reads:

  Hello, I am your Tactical Analysis and Oversight Guidance (TAOG) system. My name is _______

  Fill in the blank. Your right shoulder twists as a metallic screech runs up the scale in your ear.

  Well, what other name could you pick? You can only think of one right now, with the wires in your head all scrambled and crossed and reminding you about that one time you called the teacher “Mom” in third grade.

  P-h-o-e-b-e.

  Hello Charlie, I am your Tactical Analysis and Oversight Guidance (TAOG) system. My name is Phoebe. She whispers that as a formless voice now given form by your choice, past your ear, deep into your meat. I’m looking forward to working with you.

  That’s how it goes, only you’re not you, you’re me.

  And you had a big sister named Phoebe.

  Life outside AESF is one big vacation, only the vacation doesn’t end and I don’t get to go home, because technically, I am home, permanently downside. But I’m enjoying it. Really, I am. I take the train down to the beach every day, because that’s what you do on vacation. Brightly colored plastic umbrellas, all shapes and colors and patterns, bob outside, shielding the civilians from the unending assault of the sun.

  Take one of those umbrellas, line it with foil, it can be used to hide an explosive or a person from casual drone scans, only it makes a neat circle cut-out in transmissions that screams for attention after you’ve run your electronic eyes over it a good hundred times.

  It’s the middle of the day. Seven people on the train as it hums along over its superconductors: three teenaged boys (could be a threat, one of them’s got a backpack, who knows what’s in that), one young mother with two sub-five-year-olds (probably okay), one old lady with a parasol (sunlight glancing off the gold cross she wears on her neck, is she one of them, one of the sectarians ohshitohshitohshit call it in—)

  No response, Phoebe says. They told me my TAOG would go silent after surgery. They also told me removing the neural links wouldn’t hurt. Disconnected, Charlie. Recalibration necessary.

  Breathe. Breathe. That’s right. My hands haven’t fallen off. I just don’t have drones any more. I’m just me. The old lady is just an old lady. She’s out for the sunlight on her old bones. But I let her get off the train first, and keep my ass in the seat until I’m two stops down.

  Then I go out onto the beach. The sand feels so strange under my shoes, squashing and shushing and kicking up in little clouds. I don’t think I�
��ve run on anything but concrete or tarmac or metal decking for almost a decade. It feels different, so I smile about that, and my teeth itch in the cool breeze.

  This is what it’s like, the first time you hook into your cloud. Your consciousness shatters into a hundred pieces, one for each module.

  There’s the eyes and ears (SASbots), jammers (ESIMbots), guns and missiles (TWINs) and you’re all of them at once, trying to hold them in formation and run them through patterns. You scream. It’s cool. Everyone screams the first time, not because it hurts, but because it’s so overwhelming your body pulls a random choice out of: (a) scream, (b) cry, or (c) laugh hysterically. Crying and screaming is better, it doesn’t freak your observers out nearly as much.

  But then, goddamn, it’s the biggest rush in the world. You are a god with a thousand fingers that you can spike down into the ground like lightning. You fly, atmosphere or space, it doesn’t matter. Because when you’re hooked into your cloud, you’re out there with the drones, and your meat is left behind in the closet.

  Calibration complete. Phoebe whispers these magical words to rhyme with “I love you.”

  A taste like blood floods your mouth. It’s nauseating. Don’t worry. You get used to it.

  Life outside the drone cloud is blindness. I can’t see anything. What kind of bullshit is the visual spectrum after you’ve gotten used to having infrared, ultraviolet, radio, all piped into your head from over a hundred different eyes? I used to be a fucking titan, heavy armor Mach six in a thousand different directions, and now I’m small, naked. Just meat.

  No jobs yet, but I don’t need the money. My severance hasn’t run out, I just need something to do. Being a drone pilot isn’t much of a marketable skill in the real world. Doesn’t help you smile at assholes and sell them cars, or new computers, or vacation packages to resorts where the only people who look like you scrub the toilets. Doesn’t help with flipping burgers, either. I’ve developed this really worrying twitch in my left hand, I think it’s from one of the nanowires fizzing in my brain. Makes it hard for me to sleep, I’ll be drifting off and then suddenly my hand jerks under the covers and I’m wide awake.